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8 CES Gadgets You Have To See

Sure, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is a giant circus, but it always features something revolutionary, or at least oddly interesting. Maybe even useful. Here are eight compelling products that emerged from the show; judge for yourself how useful they might (eventually) be.

If have too much self-esteem to ride a Segway but you still want motorized personal transportation, check out SPNKIX. These motorized roller skates run at a steady 10 miles per hour and have a range of 7 miles. For just $699, you never have to walk again.

If electric roller skates seem a bit too cute, how about tooling around town in a giant mechanical spider? This 8-legged machine called the MondoSpider was strolling around CES in a back lot (presumably because it would eat fewer people there). The spider was created in 2006 and upgraded in 2010, so it doesn't have any reason to be at CES in 2013--other than it's really cool. MondoSpider was built by a team of artists at a Canadian art organization called the eatART Foundation. It's powered by hydraulics and lithium-polymer batteries, weighs 1,600 pounds and crawl creepily at about 5 miles per hour.

Like a Roomba for windows instead of floors, Ecovacs says the Winbot's light-weight, three-stage cleaning and frameless-window-frame detection system will wash your windows without the effort, accidents or arguing over who has to wash the windows. Prices range between $299 and $399.

OK, this one violates the premise by being obviously and immediately useful. GlobaTrac introduced a tracking device designed to be thrown in your luggage that lets you know if your bag made it to the same city you did. Trakdot uses cell-phone networks rather than GPS to find its location, which it can text or email to your laptop or cell phone. It's $49.95 plus $8.99 activation and $12.99 annual service fee.

Watching your weight? Why not get your utensils to help? HAPILabs' smart utensil HAPIfork
counts the number of times you move food from your plate to your mouth. It warns you if you're eating too fast, and it collect stats that are uploadable via USB to a laptop or smartphone to help track the interval between bites, length of time it took to eat a meal, and other details interesting to...someone, probably. Price isn't set yet, but you can pre-order here.

In keeping with the "obsessive collection of health-related data" theme, BodyMedia says it's easier to get into shape if you really know what you're doing, or what you've done, anyway. The BodyMedia FIT Armband has an accelerometer and range of other sensors designed to track how fast and how much you move, the number of steps in your routine, amount you sweat, skin temperature and the amount of heat you're radiating into the environment. It's not clear how all that adds up to better fitness, but the site does refer to one study that compares FIT's performance - favorably - to a $40,000 analysis machine that tracks oxygen volume in the blood.

Imprint Energy introduced a credit-card-thin flexible zinc-based battery it says can carry enough capacity to power portable devices without the limitations of weight and shape in batteries that can't bend around obstacles.

Now that we've revolutionized personal mobile devices, the home may be the next frontier for gadgets. For instance, Lowes introduced a hub designed to centralize all those digital environmental controls already packed into your house. Netgear introduced a range of security-monitoring, night-vision and media-streaming boxes. IBM, with its eye on the big picture, introduced a service designed to connect your refrigerator, media system and anything else through an Internet-connected TV to its SmartCloud, so you can keep track of who's watching pay-per-view on your TV while you're at work paying for it. The SmartCloud connectivity expands on IBM's SmartHome project, to which it just signed embedded-systems and smart-device makers STMicroelectronics and start-up Shaspa Research.